


In My Lady's Chamber

by matrixrefugee



Category: Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Genre: Awkward Sexual Situations, Awkwardness, F/M, May/September romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-11
Updated: 2011-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:22:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prunesquallor has an awkward moment with Fuschia Groan...</p>
            </blockquote>





	In My Lady's Chamber

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came about as a result of a crazy discussion with [](http://tomboy-typist.livejournal.com/profile)[**tomboy_typist**](http://tomboy-typist.livejournal.com/) : we were geeking out over a bit of crazy dialogue in the BBC miniseries of "Gormenghast", in which Fuschia asks Dr, Prunesquallor to "lend [her] an ear", and he innocently offers to "lend any part of my anatomy". This lead me to wonder about a few bits in the Bricks, particularly where it mentions that Fuschia, at about twenty five, is "no longer a virgin". And then there's the bit where a ten year old Titus knocks on his sister's door early one morning and she won't let him in, though one gets the feeling that he's accustomed to being let in. Made me wonder if Fyoosh had company that had spent the night, to which [](http://tomboy-typist.livejournal.com/profile)[**tomboy_typist**](http://tomboy-typist.livejournal.com/) replied, "OMG, it was Prune!" Thus, this daffy, awkward little fic was born...
> 
> (WARNING: Mature content including references to female auto-eroticism: got the idea for this from reading about an odd Victorian treatment for hysterics. Somewhere, Mervyn Peake is blushing...)

The imbroglio started innocuously enough, as these things often do. In her twenty-fifth year, Lady Fuschia began to suffer from recurring bouts of hysteria -- and her maid-servants from the effects thereof; Lady Gertrude ordered Dr. Prunesquallor to alleviate if not completely cure the girl. She might not be the heir to the realm, but she was a daughter of the blood, and her fits of crying and childish screaming were unseemly displays, not fitting for one of her station.

While rummaging among his predecessor's medical texts, he found a possible cure, something to settle Lady Fuschia's frantic spirit, through a gentle stimulation of her flesh in its nether regions. He had one of the Carvers shape a slender rod of ivory colored wood for the purpose.

In time, however, Lady Fuschia, by her own intuition, put two and two together and came up with an assemblage that left the usually garrulous and accommodating Prunesquallor speechless and hesitant to comply, though he was usually ready to do so as befitting his station as the castle physician. While her ladyship was too old to be his daughter, and he at about thirty eight was too young to be her father (a date that he hardly kept up with, though he knew he was a few years older than his sister Irma, who badgered him constantly about her waning youth and the growing number of her own years), he had watched her grow from an awkward dreaming girl to an awkward dreaming woman. Still she was his patient and more than that, the sister of his ruler and so he could hardly refuse her requests and commands.

He begged only that she keep these intimate therapeutic sessions as discreet as possible. And thus, roughly once or twice a month, she sent for him to come in to her chamber in the night. Thankfully, Irma thought nothing of it, except as a part of his duties as a physician. He had been called out in the night to attend to other concerns of the family Groan -- colic in young Lord Titus, Lord Sepulchrave's bouts of melancholy and his mad charades as an owl -- but he dreaded the reaction if his intimacy-craving sister were to find he was serving her young ladyship in this manner.

But he had a near-miss early one morning, when he awakened from a deep sleep, hearing Lady Fuschia's door open and voices conversing at it. Recognizing the young lord's voice coming from the hallway, Prunesquallor carefully drew the bedcovers over his naturally tousled head, now more rumpled than usual, and lay as still as possible, hoping the boy would not enter the room. The last thing that he wanted to do was to explain to the young lord what the family physician was was doing in his lordship's sister's bedchamber at that early hour and in his current state of half-deshabiliment. Fuschia was not always the soul of discretion but for once she succeeded and after a moment, Prunesquallor heard Titus retreat and the hall door closed. Fuschia returned to the bed, still in her nightgown, her long, loose black hair streaming past her shoulders. She set her candle on the bedside table. Prunesquallor restrained himself from sliding an arm under her shoulders as she settled on the pillow beside him. "And what, might your bed companion ask, brought his young Lordship to the door of your ladyship's chamber door, at so unwholesomely early an hour?" he asked. "An upset of the stomach? a nightmare running its hooves roughshod over his bed?"

"He comes to my door at this hour on most mornings," she said. "It is the only time that he and I may speak to one another freely, with no one to interrupt us."

"I appreciate your not letting him in, I would not want him to see that you had had a visitor," he said.

"I don't want him to interrupt us," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes. "I like it this way."

"Unfortunately, your ladyship's bed warmer must needs let the matter cool down, so that he might depart before his own sibling finds that he has been out all night," he said.

"Please, Dr. Prune, stay with me till I fall back to sleep," she pleaded.

"As your ladyship wishes, so I am commanded," he replied. When her respiration had fallen into a relaxed pattern, only then did he rise and draw on his trousers and waistcoat. But in the meantime, he thought that he saw something glisten in a manhole in the ceiling over the bed, as if a pair of eyes watched them through it. Likely some insolent servant, but he hoped that the edge of the canopy concealed what had transpired that night. Doctors had to maintain their patients' confidences and this one in particular brooked no revelation.

Not especially to his sister Irma, and he anticipated by two hours, the grilling that she would give him over the breakfast table. He wondered just who was peering at them, and what his young Lordship was up to at this early hour.


End file.
